Pages

Followers

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Motivate Me, Motivate you Guest Blogger Terri Bruce

Terri and I met in the Speculative Fiction Forum over at AQC. She is an amazing writer, and the more I learn about her the more I apprecieate the fact that she is willing to work with me on projects. The Blog Ring of Power was her idea, but my teasing her about it made the name I gave it stick. It has been a win/win for all involved and I have really enjoyed the author interviews.

Terri and I were chatting about getting things done one day and she talked about skills. I was so taken with the topic she agreed to do this guest post for me. So here is Terri with some great ideas...

Motivate Me, Motivate You

Every person has strengths and weaknesses. But not all
strengths (or weaknesses) are created equal; knowing the difference between a
motivated skill and a burnout skill can be a huge time (and life) saver.

As a writer, we know the areas in which we struggle—perhaps
we have a hard time writing dialog. Maybe it’s creating place-immersing
settings. And, as a writer, there’s very little we can do to work around these
weaknesses. Sure, we can try to stick to genres where our weaknesses aren’t
such a big deal, but generally, a writer has to strengthen his/her whole craft
to succeed.

But being a writer is so much more than just putting words
on paper—there’s all the tangentially related writing stuff, such as coming up
with character names, editing, and generating book titles. And then there’s all
the “author” stuff—networking, marketing, public speaking, and platform
building. And this is where the difference between “motivated skills” and
“burnout skills” makes all the difference in the world.

·Motivated Skills—things you
enjoy doing and you are good at. These skills give us great pleasure and we
continually seek out opportunities to use them.

·Development Skills—things we
enjoy doing but for which we lack the desired skill level. These are the skills
that, with training, can become motivated skills. These are the areas where we
should seek out training, mentors, and opportunities for improvement.

·Burnout Skills—things we are
good at and do NOT enjoy doing. The difficult thing about burnout skills is
that we are good at these things—so we are continually called on to use these
skills. But the problem is that using these skills takes pleasure away—we hate
doing these things. And so we become burnt out. We should avoid using our
burnout skills—even though we’re good at these things—at all costs.

·Irrelevant Skills—things we
are neither good at nor enjoy. So don’t do them! Too often, we’re told to put a
lot of time and energy into developing our weaknesses. Don’t do it! Marcus
Buckingham, in his strengths based approach to personal development, points out
that no one ever said Mozart should spend more time studying math. Just the
opposite—once it was clear his greatest strength was music, he was encouraged
to focus exclusively on that. Taking time away from the things you love and/or
are good at to pursue some arbitrary goal of “well-roundedness” doesn’t make
lot of sense (where did this idea even come from, anyway? Ever since Henry Ford
invented the production line we’ve know that specialization is the key to productivity.

So how does this relate to the writing life? Very simply—first
and foremost, if you’re getting called on to do things you don’t like because
everyone knows you’re good at them—stop telling people! Second, find ways to
get burnout and irrelevant skills off your plate. If it’s time to update my
author website and web mastering is one of my burnout or irrelevant skills then
I’m spending time on something that is, quite frankly, sucking my soul dry. And
that is time I could be spending on a motivated skill—like writing—instead. Struggling
artists that we are, it’s very unlikely that we can afford to pay for a
professional web master to maintain our site for us, but there are plenty of
opportunities for bartering. How about mentoring a high school or college
student in English in exchange for his/her web mastering skills? How about
helping a fellow writer with his/her dialog if he’ll help you with your commas?

We can’t get out of doing everything we don’t like, but by
thinking about our skills in a slightly different way, we can get a lot of
dross off our plates and ensure that we’re focusing our limited time and
energies to the areas where they will do us the most good.

What do you think? What are some of your burnout skills and
what’s a way you could do less of that?

3 comments:

Thanks for having me, Dean! I love it when my "world collide" (as George Constanza says) - who knew my experience as a career counselor would be able to inform my life as a writer?! It's true when they say that no experience is ever wasted.

Google+ Followers

Speculitive Fiction Member Since 2011

About Me

I've lived from New York to California, Washington to Texas, and several places in between. Love the Rocky Mountains, where I spent over 18 years, and I enjoy the heartland. I currently reside in Mississippi with my wife and two of my five children and two cats. A dog would be most welcome, but my wife is not overly fond of critters, she and the cats tolerate one another.
I write Speculative Fiction, mainly Fantasy, and Science Fiction. My current project is an epic fantasy that has a mind of its own.
I also enjoys photography, camping, reading, good movies, and of course telling fun stories.